How Max De Pree's Career Exemplifies Drucker's Art Of Leadership

Here are the top 5 quotes from Max De Pree’s “Creative Leadership,” article. These takeaways still hold weight today.

I was saddened recently to learn of the August 8th death, at 92, of Max De Pree, who had an illustrious career as CEO and Chairman of the innovative furniture/design company Herman Miller.

Today’s leaders and managers are under pressure to make breakthroughs in creativity and innovation for their organizations. Yet many struggle with this idea, and can’t relate well to creative, innovative people.

Max De Pree, in his years at Herman Miller, worked with creative people of many varieties, including artists, designers and architects. His writings about creativity and related subjects have a timeless quality that are applicable for managers and leaders of today and tomorrow.

In 1989, after he retired as CEO but while remaining as Chairman, he also started a parallel career as a best-selling leadership author; particularly with his first book, Leadership is an Art; the follow-up Leadership Jazz, and in 1997, with Leading Without Power: Finding Hope in Serving Community. These slim volumes are eloquent, full of wisdom of various types, and spiritually reflective of De Pree’s deep Christian faith.

Leadership is an Art contains De Pree’s best-known quotation: “The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you. In between the two, the leader must become a servant and a debtor.” As you can infer from those words, he was a proponent of, and wrote about, Robert K. Greenleaf’s concept of Servant Leadership.

De Pree was also a longtime friend and consulting client of Peter Drucker, who provided a back-cover endorsement of Leadership is an Art. (Leadership Jazz has a front-cover Drucker endorsement.) In 1990, in his book Managing the Non-Profit Organization, Drucker conducted a Q&A/extended conversation with De Pree that reveals a lot about the character of both men.

Despite the deaths of Drucker and De Pree, there are still considerable ties between the worlds of Herman Miller and Drucker. For instance, the Chairman of the Board of Advisors of the Drucker Institute is former Herman Miller executive Curt Pullen. The company also designed the Institute’s office space.

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